I finally got around to firing up a reclaimed from loan beige G3 tower a couple of days ago, and low and behold, just as the borrower had said, there was an apparent problem with the drives. There are 2 Quantum Viking 4.5GB's (UWSCSI) attached to an Adaptec 2940 [possibly Apple OEM from another (later) machine- IIRC it came w/ an ATTO card that had the external connector disabled that was moved to a Sawtooth so that the beige's Adaptec could support external devices on UWSCSI bus back when we used it here].

After powering up and booting from CD, or other external drive, one or sometimes two high pitched whine noises are heard, reminiscent of other drive noises from years ago. ASP can see the drives and identifies them, but shows the yellow caution triangle w/ exclamation point on the right hand side. Disk Utility sees the drives, but shows them as not available and won't initialize, or do anything with them. Obviously the power and data cables are still connected.

I find it odd that both drives would fail at the same time. Is it possible the Adaptec card went bad? The high pitched whine sounds drive-like however the borrower was hoping to recover some travel photos from the drives, so I wasn't going to use them for target practice just yet. Machine works great from CD or external HD, but haven't tried Zip yet, or fast ethernet and USB cards (other PCI cards in box w/ Adaptec)...

Anyhow, it's here waiting for Harbourmaster to provide it a new home; even comes original box. Ideas on what to do to get access to beige's data and/or get drives in gear before Harbourmaster shows up are much appreciated. Remember my physical limitations, so I can't tear the thing apart w/o help. The most adventurous I can probably get, is swapping the SCSI card for another one from the proverbial drawer..., if the current one isn't wedgied in too tight, but I'm thinking the odds on a bad card are fairly low. Is there any utility to check the card's functionality? Thanks...

Buzz

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Sometimes it is what it is...
and then there's times when it's really better.



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If you have another SCSI machine, you could try hooking it up in Target mode.